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The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a tra

The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young). We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.

sleepyguy 5mo ago
Perhaps they should vote, unfortunately they don't. They are unreliable as a base so politicians ignore them and their needs.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  Vote for whom? The political establishment is locking out an entire generation of younger politicians too. Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims. The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame. Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.
  - sleepyguy 5mo ago
    Talarico? Bernie? etc? When they don't vote, they leave the Boomers in charge. -GenXer
lizknope 5mo ago
Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc. I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot. In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much. It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
  - majormajor 5mo ago
    This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism. If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both: - expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford - localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability - overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
  - an0malous 5mo ago
    In a free market, the builders would just build to demand better because they’re incentivized to
- jvanderbot 5mo ago
  "We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors. I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.
throwaway27448 5mo ago
It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
  - majormajor 5mo ago
    > I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US? Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
    - majormajor 5mo ago
      A bit more specifics, to follow up: GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed. Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life? If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?
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jazz9k 5mo ago
College graduates have been saddled with debt for a few decades now. Universities know that most of the student base gets a federal loan and once the money changes hands, don't care if it can ever get paid back. This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.
- jonhohle 5mo ago
  That would unfairly couple the success of their students with their own success /sarc. The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education. In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing. Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.
seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
We build new housing, but it just isn’t keeping up with demand in those few hot cities where young people want to live. Yes, Toledo and Buffalo (in the USA) have cheap housing to get, but those aren’t where people want to live.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this). That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
  - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
    There is a reverse migration of sorts back to the rust belt and Deep South (well, Georgia and Tennessee at least), and most of that migration is driven by cheaper housing and cheaper cost of living. And this is really how it should be, we will never be able to build past demand here in Seattle without Chinese construction powress, and the unions and residents would never allow for that anyways. However, Toledo has plenty of nice places to live in (my dad was in nuclear power, so I got to live in a lot of these places also). Jobs are kind of moving with the lower COL flow, it’s just too bad the tech companies chickened out on WFH or we could have solved so many problems.
    - 827a 5mo ago
      > without Chinese construction powress We need to be honest in calling this what it is: yes the Chinese have incredible construction capacity, but the far bigger reason why their cities are growing so fast is because: they essentially have zero personal or corporate property rights in urban zones.
      - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
        That really isn’t true though, nail house term was invented in China after all. The only real magic is simply their ability to get sh*t done on time and on budget, which doesn’t exist in the USA anymore.
SecretDreams 5mo ago
Couldn't agree more. Completely aligned. Quote I refer to for this: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
bluedino 5mo ago
We've spend the last fifty years shipping every job and industry overseas. What did we expect to happen?
- epistasis 5mo ago
  That is absolutely not the case in any way. The US is the most vibrant and productive economy in the world, the envy of every other country. China is literally trying to climb the economic ladder up to the type of hugely productive, high paying jobs that the US is. And somehow the US got tricked into thinking that the low paying, less productive manufacturing jobs are what we should be climbing down to.
  - laughing_man 5mo ago
    It's true in some very important ways. Manufacturing employment is something like 15% of what it was fifty years ago. We only do manufacturing for things that require a lot of technology and a sophisticated skill set. But not everyone in society is cut out to manufacture integrated circuits. It used to be that a person on the left half of the IQ bell curve could go out and get a job making brooms, or plumbing fixtures, or toys, or any number of things that are only manufactured in China now.
    - watwut 5mo ago
      USA had low unemployemnt prior Trump ... and still has. You can worry about manufacturing in the national security sense, but it is not missing in jobs.
      - laughing_man 5mo ago
        Sure. Because people who can't find jobs go on disability. That's why we have record low labor force participation rate.
bickfordb 5mo ago
I believe we have a competitive construction market, but anti-urbanization zoning regulations, overzealous bespoke building codes and inflation in construction material prices has made construction relatively more expensive than in previous eras in the US. Aside from housing, every professional sector has been taken over and hollowed out by private equity or big tech. My grocery store, vet, plumber and doctors are all PE.
beej71 5mo ago
We're building like mad in our town. Have been for years. Thousands and thousands of new units. Prices ain't budging. It's odd.
- trhway 5mo ago
  Who would be building in the falling prices market? Whenever real estate prices start falling you see the building activity decreasing.
  - beej71 5mo ago
    Prevailing wisdom is that we need to increase supply.
    - trhway 5mo ago
      my point is who is going to provide that supply sufficient to drive prices down. Builders - wouldn't. Government? I don't see it, at least not in US. In USSR we had government provided housing, and still there was shortage and a lot of other drawbacks to such an approach.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  That just shows how little housing there is out there. Real estate pricing is far stickier than, say, stock prices. But that's also why it's super important to build before prices rise, because prices are probably not going to fall, they will at best stay sub inflationary. Additionally, in the US many many people are locked in to their current mortgage. They have a super low interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, but interest rates are many points higher now, so if they switch to a new mortgage the can no longer afford as much house as they price they could sell their current house for. That lock in and lack of places to live and move to also creates a higher demand when there are a few places that are built. "Thousands" doesn't mean much to me without comparing to the total number of existing houses, but there should be a minimum of 1% and maybe 2-3% of existing houses being built all throughout the nation. Yet most areas are not building that much if at all.
Georgelemental 5mo ago
> defunding universities No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat
- bluealienpie 5mo ago
  Universities administrators, yes. Funding for basic research, no.
- Retric 5mo ago
  The bloat was a result of withdrawing government funding / oversight and replacing them with student loans. Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild. You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.
WalterBright 5mo ago
> transfer of wealth from those who don't have it How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it? > saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans. > created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people. ???
- roenxi 5mo ago
  > ??? Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people). In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    It's nuts that people can retire with full pensions after working for 30 years. A more appropriate number would be 45.
    - mplanchard 5mo ago
      Why? The average life expectancy is ~76 for men, ~81 for women. You’re saying you shouldn’t be able to pull a full pension unless you have devoted ~half of your entire life to a company? 45 years doesn’t even seem feasible if you want to retire at 65, since most people graduate college at around 22. Add in a masters or a doctorate and 45 years of work would bring you into your 70s.
      - WalterBright 5mo ago
        A pension is for when you're too old to work. Of course, you can always save/invest your earnings and then retire when you have enough.
forgetfreeman 5mo ago
As popular as this narrative is it's all revisionist propaganda intended to distract from the actual culprits. "We" never stopped building houses. What we stopped building is 1k sq ft starter homes and made manufactured housing uneconomical, thereby effectively removing the bottom rung on the ladder of home ownership. These weren't consensus-based decisions made by older generations. They are changes to the real estate landscape that were intentionally engineered by a handful of massive developer firms. Even this ignores that a large part of the rise in housing demand is due to a flood of economic refugees from rural communities that have been gutted by a combination of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies and the corporatization of the AG industry. You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.
- laughing_man 5mo ago
  Yes. A lot of this is down to environmental restrictions and building codes. Every rule a good idea in isolation, but taken together they mean you can no longer build an inexpensive house. I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.
  - epistasis 5mo ago
    That's not environmental regulation that's just regular NIMBYism.
    - laughing_man 5mo ago
      Nope. It's a lot of stuff like insulation regulations that require exterior walls that use 2x6s instead of 2x4s. That's not NIMBYism. Nor are all the taxes and fees.
      - forgetfreeman 5mo ago
horns4lyfe 5mo ago
We haven’t eliminated entry level positions, we decided it was better to import foreign labor than to train up new grads. Because we’re dumb, and in some cases tribal.
- laughing_man 5mo ago
  That's the opposite of tribal. If we were tribal we wouldn't be importing low skill people from India to fill our entry level positions.
black_13 5mo ago
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downrightmike 5mo ago
Universities are not angels in this. MIT can fund all of their other classes with just what the Freshmen pay. 91/92 Supreme court ruled that if they give enough charity in the form of tuition reduction, they wouldn't be taxed. And so they kept raising prices and so did all the other schools. Terrible decision and schools should be on the hook for any defaulted student loans.
827a 5mo ago
> We stopped building new housing The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally). [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt.... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
- therealdrag0 5mo ago
  Ya that’s a lot of catching up to do. And location matters. Humans are more mobile than housing.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  20 years of under building from the last housing crisis. But more importantly, the most economically vibrant areas, with the most ability to provide economic opportunity, have been stunted by lack of housing: NYC, SF Bay Area, Boston, San Diego, etc. This transfers wealth to current landowners in those regions, but let's only the highest income job professions move in, and overall slows the ability of those with less to access economic opportunity. And those areas down zones half a century ago, capping out their housing ages ago. That's the true lack of housing, and it's all locational. The only thing you can't build more of is land, and it's not fungible. Best we can do is build up in those special areas where there's the magic combination of people to allow for more productivity and more jobs. (Which also happens to be far more ecologically friendly too, but I'm aware not everybody cares about the environment these days).
  - mplanchard 5mo ago
    Yeah I ran some numbers in another comment on this post, and I was a bit surprised to see that NYC’s units per capita number is about 42%, 5% fewer than my much smaller (but also plagued by lack of housing and lack of affordability) city at 47%. They’re planning to add 200k units over the next ten years, which is a start, but even if we assume no population growth, that still only gets them an additional 2.3% more units per capita. They’re also trying to spur more private development.
laughing_man 5mo ago
Young people always had higher unemployment.
testfrequency 5mo ago
The transfer of wealth is diminishing also as older generations didn’t save as much, are unable to retire, or are spending through most of their retirement
ed_balls 5mo ago
Could be just that USA is trying to reindustrialize and need more people that can do stuff with hands? - the smallest population cohort is entering workforce - Trump and Covid slowed down immigration - high interest rate slows down R&D
- epistasis 5mo ago
  Biden tried to reindustrialize and was doing a great job of it, but that was all cancelled. I don't see a single effort to reindustrialize now, and in fact the tariffing of equipment and chaotic signaling of policy has been a major impediment to any reindustrialization. And finally there have been several efforts to specifically discourage the sort of information sharing from highly industrial countries such as the Georgia Hyundai raid that was meant to stop knowledge transfer for manufacturing. The world is getting the message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_immigration_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...

sleepyguy 5mo ago

Perhaps they should vote, unfortunately they don't. They are unreliable as a base so politicians ignore them and their needs.

epistasis 5mo ago
Vote for whom? The political establishment is locking out an entire generation of younger politicians too. Asking those who have only been able to vote for a few years to have solved the problems, in a system where power is gained only through the accumulation of decades of experience, is, well blaming the victims. The greed of older generations, their lack of compassion and understanding, and their narcissism are all to blame. Young people are entering a system built by others with the ladders already pulled up. Violent revolution is the only way they could have changed the system in a short time, and nobody wants that.
- sleepyguy 5mo ago
  Talarico? Bernie? etc? When they don't vote, they leave the Boomers in charge. -GenXer

lizknope 5mo ago

Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc. EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc. I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.

epistasis 5mo ago
There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot. In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much. It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.
- majormajor 5mo ago
  This is also the cause of the gentrification anger and resulting NIMBYism. If you build some, but not enough vs what's actually needed, you get both: - expensive new market-rate construction that most people can't afford - localized bumps in rent for increased relative desirability - overall prices that continue to rise across the city because the new construction was just a drop in the bucket compared to the need And then it's easy to point to "they built that building AND our rent went up!" as a reason to oppose construction, even though in the long run they'd go up even more if that building wasn't built.
- an0malous 5mo ago
  In a free market, the builders would just build to demand better because they’re incentivized to
jvanderbot 5mo ago
"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors. I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.

throwaway27448 5mo ago

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

epistasis 5mo ago
I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.
- majormajor 5mo ago
  > I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. What is this supposed to be implying and how do you square it with the massive amount of money being poured into "disruption" and VC investment, etc, in the US? Where is degrowth being practiced at scale, and how has that caused more of a divergence between the wealthy and the rest than the opposite pro-economic-growth, pro-efficiency policies that brought us Walmart, Amazon, etc and happily shit-canned all the displaced workers from the less-efficient-but-more-evenly-distributed businesses they replaced?
  - majormajor 5mo ago
    A bit more specifics, to follow up: GDP growth rate, for instance, in the US doesn't have a significant inflection point around Reaganomics and its increases in deficit spending + "pro-growth" lowering of tax rates on the wealthy. We've never really gone away from that philosophy despite not seeing increases in growth + seeing a LOT of increases in inequality and the elites thriving while everyone else gets squeezed. Perhaps "growth" is driven primarily by cultural and technological factors (especially the latter!) and inequality is driven primarily by whether or not a population has the balls to say "even if economies of scale suggest that wealth will concentrate in big mega-players, we want to fight that"? And the US had the will to do that 90 years ago, but was successfully brainwashed into giving up on it *despite the 50s in particular being still seen even by those on the right as a "golden age" of both growth and "everyman" quality of life? If the PC revolution had started seven years earlier and the Iranian revolution had occurred seven years later how would our views of Carter vs Reagan (or some other Republican in 1984 instead) change? But which of those things did they actually cause personally?

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jazz9k 5mo ago

College graduates have been saddled with debt for a few decades now. Universities know that most of the student base gets a federal loan and once the money changes hands, don't care if it can ever get paid back. This has led to administration bloat and majors that are completely useless when you graduate. Federal loans should be eliminated and universities should back the loans themselves.

jonhohle 5mo ago
That would unfairly couple the success of their students with their own success /sarc. The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education. In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing. Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.

seanmcdirmid 5mo ago

We build new housing, but it just isn’t keeping up with demand in those few hot cities where young people want to live. Yes, Toledo and Buffalo (in the USA) have cheap housing to get, but those aren’t where people want to live.

bombcar 5mo ago
This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this). That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.
- seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
  There is a reverse migration of sorts back to the rust belt and Deep South (well, Georgia and Tennessee at least), and most of that migration is driven by cheaper housing and cheaper cost of living. And this is really how it should be, we will never be able to build past demand here in Seattle without Chinese construction powress, and the unions and residents would never allow for that anyways. However, Toledo has plenty of nice places to live in (my dad was in nuclear power, so I got to live in a lot of these places also). Jobs are kind of moving with the lower COL flow, it’s just too bad the tech companies chickened out on WFH or we could have solved so many problems.
  - 827a 5mo ago
    > without Chinese construction powress We need to be honest in calling this what it is: yes the Chinese have incredible construction capacity, but the far bigger reason why their cities are growing so fast is because: they essentially have zero personal or corporate property rights in urban zones.
    - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
      That really isn’t true though, nail house term was invented in China after all. The only real magic is simply their ability to get sh*t done on time and on budget, which doesn’t exist in the USA anymore.

SecretDreams 5mo ago

Couldn't agree more. Completely aligned. Quote I refer to for this: "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

bluedino 5mo ago

We've spend the last fifty years shipping every job and industry overseas. What did we expect to happen?

epistasis 5mo ago
That is absolutely not the case in any way. The US is the most vibrant and productive economy in the world, the envy of every other country. China is literally trying to climb the economic ladder up to the type of hugely productive, high paying jobs that the US is. And somehow the US got tricked into thinking that the low paying, less productive manufacturing jobs are what we should be climbing down to.
- laughing_man 5mo ago
  It's true in some very important ways. Manufacturing employment is something like 15% of what it was fifty years ago. We only do manufacturing for things that require a lot of technology and a sophisticated skill set. But not everyone in society is cut out to manufacture integrated circuits. It used to be that a person on the left half of the IQ bell curve could go out and get a job making brooms, or plumbing fixtures, or toys, or any number of things that are only manufactured in China now.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    USA had low unemployemnt prior Trump ... and still has. You can worry about manufacturing in the national security sense, but it is not missing in jobs.
    - laughing_man 5mo ago
      Sure. Because people who can't find jobs go on disability. That's why we have record low labor force participation rate.

bickfordb 5mo ago

I believe we have a competitive construction market, but anti-urbanization zoning regulations, overzealous bespoke building codes and inflation in construction material prices has made construction relatively more expensive than in previous eras in the US. Aside from housing, every professional sector has been taken over and hollowed out by private equity or big tech. My grocery store, vet, plumber and doctors are all PE.

beej71 5mo ago

We're building like mad in our town. Have been for years. Thousands and thousands of new units. Prices ain't budging. It's odd.

trhway 5mo ago
Who would be building in the falling prices market? Whenever real estate prices start falling you see the building activity decreasing.
- beej71 5mo ago
  Prevailing wisdom is that we need to increase supply.
  - trhway 5mo ago
    my point is who is going to provide that supply sufficient to drive prices down. Builders - wouldn't. Government? I don't see it, at least not in US. In USSR we had government provided housing, and still there was shortage and a lot of other drawbacks to such an approach.
epistasis 5mo ago
That just shows how little housing there is out there. Real estate pricing is far stickier than, say, stock prices. But that's also why it's super important to build before prices rise, because prices are probably not going to fall, they will at best stay sub inflationary. Additionally, in the US many many people are locked in to their current mortgage. They have a super low interest rate on a 30 year mortgage, but interest rates are many points higher now, so if they switch to a new mortgage the can no longer afford as much house as they price they could sell their current house for. That lock in and lack of places to live and move to also creates a higher demand when there are a few places that are built. "Thousands" doesn't mean much to me without comparing to the total number of existing houses, but there should be a minimum of 1% and maybe 2-3% of existing houses being built all throughout the nation. Yet most areas are not building that much if at all.

Georgelemental 5mo ago

> defunding universities No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat

bluealienpie 5mo ago
Universities administrators, yes. Funding for basic research, no.
Retric 5mo ago
The bloat was a result of withdrawing government funding / oversight and replacing them with student loans. Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild. You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.

WalterBright 5mo ago

> transfer of wealth from those who don't have it How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it? > saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans. > created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people. ???

roenxi 5mo ago
> ??? Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people). In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  It's nuts that people can retire with full pensions after working for 30 years. A more appropriate number would be 45.
  - mplanchard 5mo ago
    Why? The average life expectancy is ~76 for men, ~81 for women. You’re saying you shouldn’t be able to pull a full pension unless you have devoted ~half of your entire life to a company? 45 years doesn’t even seem feasible if you want to retire at 65, since most people graduate college at around 22. Add in a masters or a doctorate and 45 years of work would bring you into your 70s.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      A pension is for when you're too old to work. Of course, you can always save/invest your earnings and then retire when you have enough.

forgetfreeman 5mo ago

As popular as this narrative is it's all revisionist propaganda intended to distract from the actual culprits. "We" never stopped building houses. What we stopped building is 1k sq ft starter homes and made manufactured housing uneconomical, thereby effectively removing the bottom rung on the ladder of home ownership. These weren't consensus-based decisions made by older generations. They are changes to the real estate landscape that were intentionally engineered by a handful of massive developer firms. Even this ignores that a large part of the rise in housing demand is due to a flood of economic refugees from rural communities that have been gutted by a combination of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies and the corporatization of the AG industry. You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.

laughing_man 5mo ago
Yes. A lot of this is down to environmental restrictions and building codes. Every rule a good idea in isolation, but taken together they mean you can no longer build an inexpensive house. I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.
- epistasis 5mo ago
  That's not environmental regulation that's just regular NIMBYism.
  - laughing_man 5mo ago
    Nope. It's a lot of stuff like insulation regulations that require exterior walls that use 2x6s instead of 2x4s. That's not NIMBYism. Nor are all the taxes and fees.
    - forgetfreeman 5mo ago

horns4lyfe 5mo ago

We haven’t eliminated entry level positions, we decided it was better to import foreign labor than to train up new grads. Because we’re dumb, and in some cases tribal.

laughing_man 5mo ago
That's the opposite of tribal. If we were tribal we wouldn't be importing low skill people from India to fill our entry level positions.

black_13 5mo ago

[dead]

downrightmike 5mo ago

Universities are not angels in this. MIT can fund all of their other classes with just what the Freshmen pay. 91/92 Supreme court ruled that if they give enough charity in the form of tuition reduction, they wouldn't be taxed. And so they kept raising prices and so did all the other schools. Terrible decision and schools should be on the hook for any defaulted student loans.

827a 5mo ago

> We stopped building new housing The current rate of new build construction is the highest it has been since 2007, ignoring the spike during late COVID-era zero interest rates. Also: US population is growing slower than anytime in modern history, again excluding COVID (though, a few more years and we'll be down at that level again all naturally). [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST?utm_source=chatgpt.... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

therealdrag0 5mo ago
Ya that’s a lot of catching up to do. And location matters. Humans are more mobile than housing.
epistasis 5mo ago
20 years of under building from the last housing crisis. But more importantly, the most economically vibrant areas, with the most ability to provide economic opportunity, have been stunted by lack of housing: NYC, SF Bay Area, Boston, San Diego, etc. This transfers wealth to current landowners in those regions, but let's only the highest income job professions move in, and overall slows the ability of those with less to access economic opportunity. And those areas down zones half a century ago, capping out their housing ages ago. That's the true lack of housing, and it's all locational. The only thing you can't build more of is land, and it's not fungible. Best we can do is build up in those special areas where there's the magic combination of people to allow for more productivity and more jobs. (Which also happens to be far more ecologically friendly too, but I'm aware not everybody cares about the environment these days).
- mplanchard 5mo ago
  Yeah I ran some numbers in another comment on this post, and I was a bit surprised to see that NYC’s units per capita number is about 42%, 5% fewer than my much smaller (but also plagued by lack of housing and lack of affordability) city at 47%. They’re planning to add 200k units over the next ten years, which is a start, but even if we assume no population growth, that still only gets them an additional 2.3% more units per capita. They’re also trying to spur more private development.

laughing_man 5mo ago

Young people always had higher unemployment.

testfrequency 5mo ago

The transfer of wealth is diminishing also as older generations didn’t save as much, are unable to retire, or are spending through most of their retirement

ed_balls 5mo ago

Could be just that USA is trying to reindustrialize and need more people that can do stuff with hands? - the smallest population cohort is entering workforce - Trump and Covid slowed down immigration - high interest rate slows down R&D

epistasis 5mo ago
Biden tried to reindustrialize and was doing a great job of it, but that was all cancelled. I don't see a single effort to reindustrialize now, and in fact the tariffing of equipment and chaotic signaling of policy has been a major impediment to any reindustrialization. And finally there have been several efforts to specifically discourage the sort of information sharing from highly industrial countries such as the Georgia Hyundai raid that was meant to stop knowledge transfer for manufacturing. The world is getting the message: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_immigration_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Georgia_Hyundai_plant_imm...